I'm a C# developer having worked with .Net since it was in beta. Before that I mainly worked in C and C++. I have been developing commercial software for more than 20 years. I also mess around with microprocessors, but that's just for fun. I live near Cambridge, England and work from home in my 'silicon shed'.

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To take OpenWrt for a test drive, I have been messing about with one of these TP-Link WR740N routers. It gives me a small low-power Linux box, which I’m sure I will find many uses for. When you consider that this £30 router comes in a consumer style plastic case with a power supply and even an ethernet cable, you realise that it’s a pretty good deal. It can’t do all the things that a Raspberry Pi can do, but it still has potential. And I also found this link which shows I’m not the only one.

So after getting the cross compiler set up (which I did using a Debian machine running inside VirtualBox) and getting some simple C programs running (flashing the LEDs), I decided to try something a little more interesting.

Despite the fact that OpenWrt seems well catered for in the web server department (it can run uHTTPd which supports SSL and even embedded Lua scripts), I still wanted to try my own web server code, out of curiosity, and just because I can.

So I decided to cross compile my own web server, called dweb for OpenWrt and try it out. I’m pleased to say that it worked without any modification. The only thing that I needed to do was install the POSIX thread library onto the router, using this command:

opkg install libpthread

…and after doing that I could run dweb. My simple web based API example which uses jQuery ajax to post values worked perfectly.

So now I can write code in C and expose it as a web-based API from my router. The problem is, I don’t really know why I’d want to do that. But in any case I can. At the moment it’s a solution looking for a problem. But it’s been fun.

What I wanted to achieve with dweb was to write a small webserver in portable C code and without needing external dependencies. I suppose that using the POSIX thread library would be considered a dependency, but the dweb source code allows you to turn that off.

So hopefully, this means that dweb will run on one of these VoCore one inch Linux machines which would be pretty cool. I am thinking of what I could do with a tiny webserver running an API which exposes the GPIO pins over http. Perhaps I’ll build that home sensor network I’ve been wanting ;-)